Learning More About Good Teacher Practice

I want to  share with you an article I read in this month's The Atlantic.  The article can be found here.  I am not going to give an in-depth critique of the article, but I do want to share something that I found interesting.  The article discusses how it really is important to get students feedback about their teachers.  After all, they are the ones that are spending the most time with the teachers.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have spent a lot of money over the past couple years studying teachers evaluation systems and how students feedback can be incorporated into a teacher evaluation.  School systems that participated in the pilot programs gave students a 36 question survey about their classroom.  The students were given the survey for every class they were in so the surveys were specific to the teacher in a specific class at a specific time.  These were not general surveys that simply asked "Do you like your teacher". The benefit of these surveys is that teacher effectiveness (at least according to students) stays stable over time, unlike teacher evaluations that are based on student test scores.  The surveys were designed to garner specific information about instruction, class climate, and work load in the class.  Here is what I find interesting.

When a researcher reviewed over 199,000 student surveys he found two things.  First, less than one half of one percent of the students did not take the survey seriously and tries to skew the results.  This shows that when students are given responsibility they will take it seriously.  Secondly, of the  36 questions on the survey, five of them were most correlated to student learning.  The questions were:

1. Students in this class treat each other with respect.
2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
3. Our class stays busy and does not waste time.
4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

These are very straightforward expectations for any well-run classroom. As a matter of fact, #5 reflects the brain research that I learned in Phoenix; true learning occurs through trial and error and correcting mistakes. 

I am not advocating that our school district include this kind of information into our teacher evaluation; I think that it is an interesting idea.  I do think that a survey such as this can serve as a great conversation starter with a teacher as they reflect on their practice.  I do like the fact that the results in a student survey are more stable than student test scores (which fluctuate from student group to student group) and I believe that a student survey may be an option to consider to gain true reflection of how well teachers do in the class.  I am continually impressed with the quality of teachers that we have in the school district.  Our teachers care about helping students learn by providing engaging lessons every day.  I believe a student survey would simply reflect that reality.